All posts tagged ‘App’

Hoping to make use of the quieter Easter period for a holiday, I’ve ended up creating something of a monster. What started as a family trip to New Zealand has sprawled somewhat into a chance to test travel, gadgets and games on the road.

To keep us on the straight and narrow we’ve been set-up with some great navigational advice in the form of the CoPilot Live app on our iPhone. This has enabled us to setup the entire trip before we go which should save some headaches on the road. I’ve also setup our 3DS’s and 3DS XL’s with a bunch of eShop games to help entertain the kids on the flight and our 10 hour KiwiRail journey from Auckland to Wellington.

Finally, we’ll be testing out Skycouch economy seat for Air New Zealand. This novel seat design promises to help families get more rest by converting into something of a bed platform. With three children under 10 for the 24 hour journey I’m sure we’ll appreciate all the help we can get.

I’ll be reporting back with how it’s all going in due course, in the meantime you can watch our first Geek New Zealand installment to get you in the Antipodean mood.

We’ve covered a few DJ apps here on GeekDad since the arrival of the iPad, including Algoriddim’s DJay and IK Multimedia’s DJ Rig. Both are excellent apps, and perform their required functions perfectly well, but now there’s a new kid on the block – and he dresses a little differently. Both DJay and DJ Rig rely heavily on the past for their interface designs, featuring skeuomorphic representations of the turntables, crossfaders, buttons and knobs that an ‘old skool’ DJ will recognise right away. Traktor DJ, from renowned professional music software and hardware company Native Instruments, throws all that out of the window and starts afresh for the digital age.

Traktor DJ might be late to this particular party, but it arrives with style. Native Instruments have brought the DJ app properly into the touchscreen era by dispensing with the fake wheels of steel and letting get you fingers on what really matters: the waveforms of the music itself. They take up the majority of the screen space with various buttons arranged around them, together with the one remaining skeuomorph, the all important crossfader. Each ‘deck’ has four main buttons: play/stop, loop, EQ and FX. These last two sliding-out panels over the waveform with a low/mid/hi equaliser/filter and eight FX x/y pads respectively. The x/y pads are super simple to use and feature a lock button to hold the effects while you mess around with some other parameter. The tempo control is beautiful implemented version of the click wheel of a regular iPod. You tap to open it out, then circle your finger around to speed up or slow down the music, and the faster you circle, the faster it changes.

I still think we need more education in geography in this country. So many people can’t identify obscure, and sometimes not obscure, countries, let alone show you where they are located on a globe. So I am all for it when I hear of a new geography app, especially one that isn’t purely packaged for children.

Image: Appyness

TouchWorld is a teaching and quiz app that allows you to both explore the world, learning about individual countries and capitals, and test your knowledge about their locations. When you first start the app, it quizzes you on the location of the continents. It shows you a map of the world and asks you to find Australia. It then continues through the other continents, and then moves on, testing you on the countries in each continent. Once you locate the specified country, the app gives you almanac information on it. If you tap the wrong country, the app tells you what country you chose, and shows the info about it, helping you learn. You can also pick and choose what parts of the world you want to study, exploring by browsing on a map or picking them from an alphabetic country list. The app gives you certificates when you finish each quiz, and the difficulty can be set to easy or hard.

Image: Appyness

The app’s interface isn’t the most intuitive, but once you learn your way around, it’s very educational, teaching about countries and capitals of the world, including their locations on a world map. I wish that each country’s page showed where it is located in the world, but if you tap on the magnifying glass, you can explore the world on the map and find countries that way. You can also access the Wikipedia page for any country.

The look isn’t fancy, but for a basic world geography app, it’s decent. There is plenty of room to explore. It’s not for little kids, as there is a lot of reading, but it is wonderful for people who love the subject of geography.

TouchWorld is available in the App Store for $2.99. It’s great for older kids, teens, and adults to explore the world and test their knowledge about world geography. It’s pretty basic and relies on a lot of freely available content, but it’s a simple way to test what you know and compare regions of the world.

There are many more fun ways to make 2D things into 3D than by putting on a silly pair of glasses and sitting in a darkened room, getting a headache and motion sickness. Foldify is one of them. It’s a new iPad app from a Polish developer called Pixle and it helps you turn a flat piece of paper into a 3D paper toy in a remarkably simple, and beautifully presented, way.

Foldify’s templates

When you first launch the app you’re taken on a step-by-step journey through the various screens and function of the app. It a takes about a minute and by the time you’re done you’ll know everything you need to start making your own models. Once the tutorial is done you’re dropped into the ‘My Foldify’ screen showing an example of each of the ten paper templates it come preloaded with. You can chose to edit one of them directly or get a blank template by tapping the big plus button. Either way, you then jump straight into the fun stuff – creating your toy. Continue Reading “Foldify is an Easy way to Make Your own Papercraft Toys” »

Made in Me, the UK-based creative studio behind the successful Me Books digital story book app, has just released three new apps based on chapters from their BAFTA nominated educational game, The Land of Me (which Dan Donahoo wrote about back in 2010). The original version was a desktop app that ran in Adobe’s AIR software (and they won an Adobe MAX award for it). The first chapter was free and then you could purchase additional chapters as you pleased. Now those same chapter assets have been repackaged into three separate apps, available for $2.99/£1.99 in the App Store. Continue Reading “The Land of Me Makes the Leap to the iPad” »

Designed for creative kids aged 7-10, Zeenii will be an iPad app with new weekly issues about interesting topics for kids. Each week, there will be interactive features, online and offline projects, and videos, among other things to do.

The first issue, “Launch!,” will be about space exploration, including information about the Mars Rover. Kids will also be able to decide what six things they would pack if they went on a trip in space. They can take photos of those items with the iPad, and then submit them to Zeenii, where they will be curated online. Kids can then peruse other submissions as well.

Peter Molyneux is a man that needs no introduction to most gamers out there. The British game designer started his career back in 1984 and has created many hits over the years including Populous, Syndicate, Theme Park and the Fable series. He has gone from being a bedroom programmer to running two studios of his own – Bullfrog Productions and Lionhead Studios – and became the Creative Director of Microsoft’s European games studios when they brought Lionhead back in 2006. Earlier this year, after Fable: The Journey was finally released, he announced he was leaving Microsoft to join his old Lionhead CTO Tim Rance and other gaming veterans in a new venture called 22Cans with the philosophy to “work on truly innovational and experimental ideas leading to the release of a new form of digital entertainment.”

Their first experiment, “Curiosity – What’s Inside The Cube” (to give it its full title — the subtitle was added to avoid confusion with the Mars rover) is part massively multiplayer online game, part social experiment and completely and utterly insane. The free app is available for both iOS and Android devices and when you first start it up you see a gently rotating cube (rather like a Borg ship), floating in a white room. You can spin the cube, pinch to zoom in and out and a tap will take you right into the surface of the cube. As you zoom in, you start to see the individual pixels of the image on the surface. But then it zooms you in further, revealing the pixels that make up the pixels of the image. And then again. When you are zoomed all the way in, each of these pixels becomes a “Cubelet” and the idea of the game is to chip away these cubelets with a tap of your finger.Continue Reading “Curiosity Killed the App?” »

Last year we told you about Me Books, a great story book app for your iDevices featuring classic story books from the days of old, lovingly scanned and recreated for the digital age, each one featuring a specially recorded narration and the ability to record your own version. Over the course of the year, Me Books has expanded, adding new books, with the original version becoming the home for vintage Ladybird books and a new Peppa Pig branded version containing just stories about the pre-schoolers’ favorite porky pal.

Me Books in-app shop

Now they’ve added a ‘catch-all’ version with enhanced features and a much larger library of over 100 books available as in-app purchases, including all the previous Ladybird and Peppa Pig ones, plus a selection of titles from publishers such as Penguin, Puffin, Ladybird, Bloomsbury and Andersen Press. The app itself is now free and comes with a Ladybird version of Little Red Riding Hood and when you sign up for an account you get another three books for free to start your collection off. Each one downloads directly into the app and they weigh in at around 30MB each, mostly due to the excellent audio narration files, which feature the voice talents of the likes of Sir David Jason, Tamsin Greig, Adam Buxton, Josie Lawrence and Richard E. Grant (read an interview with him about the process on the Me Books blog).Continue Reading “Me Books – Enhanced Storybooks for the Digital Age” »

Last week I highlighted the work of a great new development team, Curious Hat, whose focus is to make apps jump off the screen and merge the digital world with our own. Well, I had to give a shout out to another app doing similar things.

CobyPic is by far my favorite coloring app ever. I’m not a fan of apps that simulate drawing or coloring for young children, mainly because I want my mobile devices to do things that you can’t do with a crayon and a piece of paper. Well, CobyPic makes this a reality.

The way you color with CobyPic is, after choosing the picture you want to color in, you have to look around your environment and find an item with a color that you like, then point the camera at it. When you are happy with the color that is in the circle on your screen you hit a button and that becomes the color of part of your picture. The beauty of it is the camera also picks up textures and shading and allows children to create all types of beautiful designs.

You can see how that evolves in the image story presented above.

If you are interested in these new apps that engage the children with the world around them through their mobile device, then CobyPic is definitely one you should check out.